There haven't been many more iconic classes in the NHL Draft in the past few decades in the league than the 2003 entry draft class, which took place a little over two decades ago in hockey. Highlighted by Marc-Andre Fleury and Eric Staal, the 2003 draft class is guaranteed to yield a number of Hall-of-Fame inductees.
We also have multiple Stanley Cup Champions from this draft class who defined the late 2000s and early-to-mid 2010s decades in the NHL.
This was the first draft lottery from the 2000s in the NHL early in that decade that saw the Los Angeles Kings get a lottery pick in the first round.
The first few rounds of the 2003 draft class in the NHL have gone down as a legendary group, with well over a dozen players from this class having played over 1,000 career games in the regular season.
This draft class also includes the last remaining active player from the pre-lockout period in the NHL, defenseman Brent Burns of the Colorado Avalanche this season.
Here's a redraft of the 2003 NHL Entry Draft lottery in the first round.
There is no reason in my mind why the Pittsburgh Penguins would make another pick in this hypothetical redrafting of the 2003 draft lottery at No. 1 overall besides legendary goalie Marc-Andre Fleury. It wasn't common to see goalies getting drafted first overall in the NHL in the entry draft at the time in the early 2000s decade.
But if any goalie has lived up to the hype of the first overall pick in the legendary 2003 draft class in this hypothetical reimagining of the lottery from this year, it is probably Fleury. No goalie has won more games, started more games, and/or had more shutouts in the regular season in this draft class from 2003 than Fleury for the Penguins.
Fleury also won three Stanley Cups (three with the Penguins) and won the Vezina Trophy and Jennings Trophy in the 2020-21 season.
Similar to the case with Fleury, I don't think it would make much sense for the Carolina Hurricanes to pick anyone else in the No. 2 overall slot in the first round in this redrafting of the 2003 draft than center Eric Staal. Could the Hurricanes pick someone else and have it make sense in an argument at the center position?
Probably.
But knowing what we know now that Staal won a Stanley Cup with the Hurricanes in 2006 (the first in franchise history) and he captained the team for nearly a decade, I think it's best to keep him here at second overall in the 2003 draft lottery in the first round.
Staal has played the most career regular season games of any center in this draft class and he ranks second in total points (1,063).
This is the first pick in this hypothetical redrafting of the 2003 draft lottery in the first round that is different in the top three than who the Florida Panthers picked at No. 3 overall.
The Panthers originally picked forward Nathan Horton in the 2003 draft lottery in the first round. Instead of picking Horton, the Panthers get a Stanley Cup-winning center and a longtime two-way respected player in center Patrice Bergeron at No. 3 overall in the first round in the lottery.
Bergeron is one of just four forwards from this draft class from '03 who played over 1,000 career regular season games and scored over 1,000 career points. Bergeron scored over 100 points in his career in the postseason and won the Selke Trophy six times in his career with the Boston Bruins over the course of nearly two decades.
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President Trump promised to turn the US into ‘the crypto capital of the planet’. May James/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Images
President Trump promised to turn the US into ‘the crypto capital of the planet’. May James/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Images
Crypto should be soaring right now. All the conditions are in place for a spectacular rally: abundant money supply, easy financial conditions, and a US administration which is actively pushing crypto with favourable deregulation and the creation of a strategic reserve to boost its price. President Trump has promised to turn the US into “the crypto capital of the planet” — and he appears to mean it.
And yet, after a rally to an all-time peak at the start of October, Bitcoin has fallen hard, shedding some 15% of its value in just the last two weeks. Sharp volatility isn’t unusual in crypto but this pullback has happened at a time when the broader market has either held steady or kept rallying. G7 markets are off by 1 or 2% but emerging markets remain buoyant. Meanwhile, gold — the heavier, klunkier version of the “digital gold” that Bitcoin purports to be — is soaring, rising 7% over the same two-week period, and taking its gain since the new year to an eye-popping 60%.
It could be that Bitcoin’s seemingly relentless upward climb will resume in the coming days and that all this will turn out to be much ado about nothing. But the past fortnight could also be a harbinger of its eventual demise. The Bitcoin oligarchs may find it eventually explodes in their hands.
When Bitcoin was created amid the angry fallout from the 2008 bank bailouts, it was designed to take money out of the hands of the bankers and oligarchs who dominated finance and hand it to the people, offering them an alternative system in which to conduct their business. Its political purpose was buried in the very first block of Bitcoin mined, which contained the line: “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.” The digital currency was built upon the novel blockchain technology, which substituted a digital chain for the ledgers used by banks to record transactions, enabling users to thereby circumvent the banks. By fixing its supply at a maximum of 21 million, Bitcoin’s creators ensured that unlike the fiat currency managed by central banks, it could not be devalued: the more money central banks printed to re-capitalise the collapsed financial system, the more valuable Bitcoin would become.
Yet the revolution in finance it was meant to bring about never took place. True, for those rebels who got in early, Bitcoin has certainly paid off handsomely. Worth mere pennies at its creation, it surpassed the $10,000 mark by the end of its first decade and is worth over $100,000 today.
Beyond that, though, not much remains of Bitcoin’s early, idealistic vision. There was admittedly some democratisation, as over 50 million people bought Bitcoin — more if one includes people who’ve bought shares in funds that own Bitcoin. Yet it never managed to become an actual currency, being too cumbersome and volatile to be useful as a medium of exchange.
More tellingly, the crypto universe is now dominated by a handful of oligarchs managing large funds and “Bitcoin treasuries” who, by forging close ties with the Trump administration, have used state patronage to boost their asset values, much as the banks did in 2008. Trump and his family have themselves reportedly made $1 billion off their crypto creations. And with investment banks now offering crypto products to their clients, the formal takeover of crypto seems complete. This isn’t the radical, decentralised financial system we were promised.
Rather than treat crypto as an alternative financial system, these “crypto-garchs” have turned it into a speculative asset, whose price they manipulate through Bitcoin treasuries — large funds whose purpose is to take Bitcoin off the market so as to further boost its price.
The biggest of these funds is MicroStrategy (which, though recently re-branded as Strategy, still goes by the stock-ticker label of MSTR). MSTR was originally a software company founded in 1989 by American entrepreneur Michael Saylor. After a history of setbacks and repeated run-ins with regulatory and tax authorities, Saylor finally found his pot of gold in 2020. At that time, as central banks responded to the Covid crash by flooding the market with money, Bitcoin rallied strongly. Saylor used his company’s cash to buy a relatively small stash of Bitcoin. When it rose in value, his plan took flight.
The business model was simple: by buying Bitcoin in large quantities, MSTR helped bid up its price. As the value of its holdings rose, so did the company share price. That meant MSTR could both sell new shares and raise new debt, further boosting its holdings. And on it went for the next four years in a virtuous — to the company and its shareholders — upward spiral. The value of MSTR’s Bitcoin holdings rose from $250 million in 2020 to over $40 billion this year, while MSTR’s share price shot up from $12 to over $400 in the same time span. Other funds soon followed suit, and today the vast majority of Bitcoin are held by just 2% of its owners, with a few dozen of them alone controlling a fifth.
Taking over the market in this way gave the crypto-garchs both economic and political leverage: economic, in that by removing Bitcoin from circulation they reduced the market’s liquidity, which amplified the impact of their further purchases, since they were now bidding for a smaller pool of Bitcoin. And political, in that they now had deep pockets with which to influence politicians in the 2024 election.
By John Rapley
With the Biden administration taking a sceptical view of crypto, the crypto-garchs turned to Donald Trump. Although originally a crypto-sceptic, calling it a scam as recently as 2021, Trump saw the opportunity in forging ties with an industry that was then out of favour. The industry donated more than $130 million to election campaigns, with an eye on displacing crypto-sceptics and supporting their backers, led by Trump. In return, Trump promised to lift regulation and promote the industry.
After Trump won the election, he came good on his pledges. He appointed big crypto-donors such as Howard Lutnick to his Cabinet, ended investigations into firms such as Gemini, which is owned by the same Winklevoss twins who’d donated $3 million to his political action committee, and withdrew a lawsuit against Coinbase, which together with some of its owners had contributed some $16 million to Trump’s campaign funds. After announcing his plan to create a strategic Bitcoin reserve, Trump hosted several crypto-garchs at the White House, Michael Saylor among them, to discuss its implementation.
All this paid big dividends to MSTR. In the month after Trump’s election victory, the price of Bitcoin rose over 50%, which enabled Saylor to return to the market with a major share flotation. MSTR raised $21 billion in share sales, giving it a powerful armoury to juice the Bitcoin price further.
But for all its lucre, there was an obvious flaw in this plan. Given their dominance of the market, that amplification of the impact of their purchases worked both ways. Given the relatively low volume of Bitcoin trades on any given day, even a small sale will sharply raise the supply — MSTR alone owns more Bitcoin than trade daily, so even a small liquidation of its portfolio would cause prices to fall sharply. If the crypto-garchs sold in volume to cover their debts or meet expenses, they’d crash the market. In for a penny, they were now in for a pound.
The crypto-garchs may now be holding a time-bomb. If MSTR is anything to go by, the money may be drying up: of the $21 billion the company raised last year, MSTR blew it all in the following three months. Since then, the company has struggled to raise new share capital.
The company isn’t under any imminent pressure. The debt MSTR raised to buy Bitcoin doesn’t come due for another two years, and having purchased its stash of Bitcoin for an average price of around $74,000, it’s still nearly 50% up. But if Bitcoin doesn’t resume rising, MSTR will struggle to raise more capital. In the meantime, its purchases of Bitcoin are diminishing, and failing — for now, at least — to bolster the price. MSTR is still buying Bitcoin at a weekly rate, but it is paying above market rates and its purchases have grown much smaller. Amid this, smaller Bitcoin treasuries are now starting to go to the wall.
This may explain why the gold market is booming as Bitcoin suffers. It appears that investors believe that if the only thing left of Bitcoin is a digital equivalent to gold — a store of value with limited fungibility — they might as well stick with the original. After all, humans have turned to gold amid social and economic crises for millennia, but have only held Bitcoin for a few years. If they sense a major crash might be coming, atavism may lead them back into the fold of what they know to work.
In the short term, given all the favourable tailwinds, it seems more likely than not that Bitcoin will resume its rise. But the events of the last two weeks may foreshadow Bitcoin’s eventual endgame: the spark that lights a fire under markets. Bitcoin has now spread so deeply into the formal system that a major crash would likely force other liquidations as fund managers looked to cover their losses, possibly starting a chain-reaction through markets. And while oligarchs in 2008 had every reason to expect the government would bail them out, this time might be different. The proportionate size of US debt has doubled in the intervening years, and bailing out the Bitcoiners would likely send bond yields soaring. The crypto-garchs may thus not find the shelter they’d expect in a storm.
If this ends up toppling a few oligarchs, Bitcoin’s original creators may feel their vision came true after all.
John Rapley is an author and academic who divides his time between London, Johannesburg and Ottawa. His books include Why Empires Fall: Rome, America and the Future of the West (with Peter Heather, Penguin, 2023) and Twilight of the Money Gods: Economics as a Religion (Simon & Schuster, 2017).
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It’s hard not to notice the sharp move in Pi Coin price over the last few sessions. The price has slumped to $0.2088, down 2.61% in a single day and an eye-soaring 11.92% in the last seven days. Market cap has followed suit, falling to $1.72 billion. What’s concerning is that, Pi Coin isn’t just following the broader market trend, it’s underperforming it.
The buzz around its DeFi testnet and decentralized exchange rollout has gone down. As traders are now becoming more cautious as technical risks and inflation worries cloud sentiment. With volatility picking up, participants want to know if Pi will go deeper or if a reversal could be in sight.
Where will Pi Price Go Next?
After Pi Coin price failed to break out above the key $0.228 resistance, marking the top of a descending channel, it tumbled to $0.209. This price action triggered further technical warning signs and left traders on high alert. On the chart, the Fibonacci 78.6% retracement level at $0.202 aligns closely with the current price zone. Further signaling a possible area for sideways consolidation before the next major move.
Looking deeper, the RSI 14 is at 28.61, a level considered oversold, yet lacking any real bullish divergence, which means buyers aren’t rushing in just yet. Consequently, the MACD indicator stays negative with a bearish crossover intact, evidenced by its -0.00074 histogram value. These signs suggest the market’s mood remains cautious.
For downside levels, immediate support sits at the psychological $0.20 mark. If Pi Coin decisively breach that level and close below it, there’s risk of a deeper pullback toward $0.18, which is the June low. Until some real catalyst emerges, traders need to watch for further choppy action and increased volatility as traders digest both technical cues and broader supply concerns.
FAQs
Pi Coin has pulled back sharply due to profit-taking after Pi Network’s DeFi testnet hype faded, persistent concerns over its large circulating supply, and multiple bearish technical signals.
Immediate support rests at $0.20, with the next key support at $0.18 if that fails. On the upside, resistance is at $0.228, the top of the descending channel.
Currently, the technical signals stay bearish with no sign of a quick reversal. Patience is the key.
Select market data provided by ICE Data Services. Select reference data provided by FactSet. Copyright © 2025 FactSet Research Systems Inc.Copyright © 2025, American Bankers Association. CUSIP Database provided by FactSet Research Systems Inc. All rights reserved. SEC fillings and other documents provided by Quartr.© 2025 TradingView, Inc.
The Georgia Lottery offers multiple draw games for those aiming to win big. Here’s a look at Oct. 18, 2025, results for each game:
03-11-27-40-58, Powerball: 10, Power Play: 3
Check Powerball payouts and previous drawings here.
Midday: 5-8-1
Evening: 1-7-3
Night: 4-4-1
Check Cash 3 payouts and previous drawings here.
Midday: 9-8-4-2
Evening: 5-6-3-0
Night: 0-2-6-7
Check Cash 4 payouts and previous drawings here.
10-23-33-39-48, Cash Ball: 04
Check Cash4Life payouts and previous drawings here.
Early Bird: 06
Matinee: 13
Drive Time: 14
Primetime: 03
Night Owl: 01
Check Cash Pop payouts and previous drawings here.
Midday: 0-8-4-9-6
Evening: 3-1-5-4-4
Check Georgia FIVE payouts and previous drawings here.
01-03-05-26-34
Check Fantasy 5 payouts and previous drawings here.
Feeling lucky? Explore the latest lottery news & results
This results page was generated automatically using information from TinBu and a template written and reviewed by a Georgia editor. You can send feedback using this form.
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Photo by: Karla Ann Cote
Love it or hate it, one could never accuse the New York State Lottery of failing to offer customers plenty of choices.
From scratch-off games to multi-state drawings, twice-weekly contests to Quick Draw running every four minutes, the lottery has a game for you regardless of whether you want to instant gratification or suspense, lust after a few thousand or multiple millions, have 10 lucky numbers or just three.
Much of lottery’s revenue goes to state government’s coffers. A substantial share pays vendors who make and market the games. But just under half the money generated by lottery players goes back to them—or, more accurately, transfers from one player to another—in the form of prizes.
After a Freedom of Information Request, City Limits obtained from the Division of Lottery data on sales by each lottery vendor around the state and the amount of smaller prizes ($600 or less) paid out by each location. We also obtained a breakdown of larger prizes (more than $600) by the ZIP code in which they were claimed.
By compiling the sales and winnings data by ZIP code—and tossing out codes that registered wagers but no winnings, which suggested that prizes were claimed elsewhere—we produced this clickable map of lottery play last year:
The top ten ZIP codes for lottery sales were all in New York City:
This is one of a series of articles on the past, present and future of gambling in New York State. Click here to read more. The Fund for Investigative Journalism’s generous support made this series possible.
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